- Controversial screenwriter Max Landis is writing a treatment for a new G.I. Joe movie for Paramount.
- The project marks his first project for a major studio since he was accused of sexual assault by multiple women in the late 2010s.
- Danny McBride is also developing a separate G.I. Joe treatment for the studio.
Max Landis is attempting a Hollywood comeback.
The controversial Bright screenwriter is penning a treatment for a new G.I. Joe movie for Paramount, Entertainment Weekly has learned. The project marks his first new work for a major studio since 2019, when eight women accused him of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
Landis’ project isn’t the only new G.I. Joe movie in development. EW has also learned that Danny McBride is writing a separate treatment for a different project in the franchise, which a source says will not be combined with Landis’ treatment (though THR reports that multiple sources say that the two projects will eventually be fused).
Representatives for Landis didn’t immediately respond to EW’s request for comment Friday.
Landis seemingly acknowledged the news on his Instagram Stories on Thursday night by posting a screenshot of Oscar Isaac’s character in Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker saying, “Somehow…” — a cropped version of a meme of the character saying “Somehow, Palpatine returned,” which is frequently used as an online response to a person’s inexplicable comeback.
Paramount Pictures
Landis, the son of Animal House director John Landis, previously wrote the screenplay for Josh Trank’s 2012 found-footage superpower thriller Chronicle. He also wrote and directed the comedy Me Him Her, and penned the Kristen Stewart-Jesse Eisenberg action comedy American Ultra, the James McAvoy-Daniel Radcliffe sci-fi horror movie Victor Frankenstein, and the Sam Rockwell-Anna Kendrick action comedy Mr. Right, all in 2015.
He wrote the script for David Ayer’s 2017 Netflix fantasy crime thriller Bright, which starred Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, and created the BBC comedy-mystery series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which ran for two seasons in 2016 and 2017 and starred Samuel Barnett and Elijah Wood.
Landis was first accused accused of sexual assault by actress Anna Akana in 2017. Two years later, the Daily Beast published an article in which eight women accused him of emotional abuse, physical violence, and rape.
Multiple outlets reported that Landis’ managers dropped him as soon as they heard about the Daily Beast article. MGM also shelved Deeper, a thriller Landis wrote, after the article’s publication, IndieWire reported. Landis’ most recent Hollywood credit came with the 2020 war horror movie Shadow in the Cloud, which was rewritten without Landis’ involvement after the Daily Beast article.
Landis didn’t publicly respond to the allegations until 2021, when he published an essay on Medium saying that “some of what’s been said about me is true” and that “my instability translated into relationships as emotional abuse, infidelity, and wild unpredictable emotional behavior and tantrums that imploded many of my closest relationships.”
He added, “I never apologized or denied because some of it is true, and the parts of it that aren’t true don’t deserve apologies, they just make me feel impotent fury.” He also noted that “I’ve never been the kind of monster the internet occasionally thinks I am.”
In the years since the controversy, Landis has maintained an active YouTube channel and helmed several fan films based on DC Comics.
Paramount Movies/YouTube
Meanwhile, after decades of successful toy sales, G.I. Joe launched as a movie franchise in 2009 with The Rise of Cobra, which starred Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ray Park, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The film received a sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, in 2013, which saw Tatum and Park return as Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis, Lee Byung-hun, and Adrianne Palicki joined the franchise.
G.I. Joe returned with a prequel-slash-reboot, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, in 2021. The film starred Henry Golding and only made $40 million at the worldwide box office, on a reported budget of $88 million.
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The G.I. Joe franchise also quietly returned to the big screen in 2023’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, as the film’s protagonist, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), was handed a business card bearing the G.I. Joe logo in the film’s final scene. Paramount then announced that it was officially developing a G.I. Joe andTransformers crossover movie at CinemaCon in 2024, though Rise of the Beasts director Steven Caple Jr. told EW about his ideas to merge the two franchises the previous year.
“There’s a big mission at hand… I think it’s really cool that there are other planets out there with Transformers,” the filmmaker said. “I just feel like we’ve been on Earth for a very long time. So there might be something interesting to explore there, maybe taking this war and battle somewhere else.”